19. Flesh In The Inkpot

I’m beginning to feel a little more like myself again (or less like somebody else) but damnit! I fear my grades this year. Have this sinking feeling I didn’t do well in Geography. Like Math and History and Art (and practically every other subject save English), Geography does not come easily to me. In fact, it doesn’t come at all. How are you supposed to know where everywhere is when you don’t even know where you are?
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With every page I tear from my Far Side calendar another day stares me in the face, another 24-hour box and I’m still I’m not used to it. So sure I’d be gone by now.

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Still here. And days go by. They sneak up on you. Paranoid and self-pitying. I’m pathetic. Like a soldier on his belly feeling hard done by, I crawled through the minefield of exams, trying to do my best, under the circumstances, as I was.
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Laughable. I’d studied long and hard only to find I’d been studying the wrong things. And there’s a lesson there, right? Studying is one thing: studying the right things is another thing all together.
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Completely.
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No doubt all the examiners will conspire against me. Failing is inescapable. For the record, here and now let it be said: I tried but couldn’t take it as seriously as some of my teachers (and Dad) would have liked. Take my math teacher for example. He’d actually have you believe that your life won’t be worth living if you don’t get a good grade in the subject. Mikey says Mr Tully (a mad Irishman no less) has gone a theory too far. ‘One more wafer-thin theorem, sir? - and his mind falls into itself, like a house hit by a wrecking ball. He fought in ‘Nam, you know. Still suffers flashbacks and all,’ Mikey told me in earnest.
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‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get you,’ I informed him.
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Jim Morrison once lamented, This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.
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I know what he means.
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